Women. Can’t live with ’em.
“So what’s up?” Sarah asked.
Jeri said, “We might have a lead on Allie. And Reinhart, if he’s in the mix, which looks likely. It might not be anything, but it looks better than the one in Tonopah.”
Sarah’s face fell. “God, I wish Allie would call again. Or text, Facebook me. Something. I hate this not knowing.”
We piled into Sarah’s Audi—we’d taken Jeri’s Porsche to Sarah’s apartment—with me in back where the leg room can be measured in meters, not inches, so my turning sideways in the seat was just theatrics. Jeri told her about Bob Odermann and the SUV registered to Bob’s dead wife as we drove to the address in Sparks that Ma had come up with. In fact, Ma had supplied us with four addresses, the home and business addresses of both Odermann and Wexel’s lawyer, Leland Bye.
“His wife has been dead for two years but the new car was in her name?” Sarah asked. “That’s gotta mean something, doesn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” Jeri said. “It could mean Bob’s really unobservant.”
Damn, I wish I’d thought of that.
But then the talk turned to such amiable chatter about health food and where the best organic produce could be found in Reno that it was as if Oregon and Tonopah had never happened, or was such a non-issue that none of it warranted discussion—or that there was a hulking pile of ears in the backseat that didn’t need to hear any of what they might really want to talk about.
Well, they were wrong. The ears craved information.
Anyway, we arrived safely in a residential neighborhood in Sparks and cruised slowly past a nondescript one-story house that was well maintained but . . . nondescript. Like hiding an egg in an egg carton, it blended in with the rest of the houses on the street to the point that it hardly existed: light blue vinyl siding, off-white trim, aluminum-frame windows, asphalt roofing shingles, front door with a small glass insert at eye level, fourteen hundred square feet, all on what looked like a sixth of an acre with a forty-foot poplar tree in the backyard, leaves just starting to turn color. Net worth, no more than a hundred sixty-five thousand. It didn’t exactly shout, “My dead wife can afford a new Mercedes SUV.” But then, how many dead wives in the neighborhood could?
The time was three thirty-five p.m. No car in the driveway. The door was rolled down on a two-car attached garage. No sign of life.
“Now what?” Sarah asked.
“Let’s go see where the guy works,” Jeri said. She gave Sarah the address of a print shop on Kietzke Lane.
The shop was small but it looked clean and was in a fairly decent location. I didn’t think it would support a Mercedes SUV, but that was only an impression. Bob might’ve paid off the mortgage and could now afford a car worth two-thirds as much as his house. Not a great financial move by any stretch, but his kids might be grown, wife gone, insurance policy kicked in a hundred grand, and he might be feeling upwardly mobile again.
The Fine Printing Company—a great name that probably took a lot of thought by a passel of big brains—shared a parking lot with a Jiffy Lube next door. It was impossible to tell which cars belonged to the owners or customers of which businesses, but none of them was a Mercedes anything—SUV or otherwise. The only green car on the lot was an aging Saturn SL2.
“Now what?” Sarah asked again. We were parked on the street, almost in front of the place.
“What do you think, Mort?” Jeri asked, looking not at me but at the print shop.
Ah, finally bringing the backseat into the loop. “Looking for a little professional advice, are we?”
She turned and stared at me. “I was under the impression that someone in this car is training to be a gumshoe, so I thought I’d give that person a chance to shine like a freakin’ beacon.”
“Was that irony? I have trouble with irony. Although that rhyme at the end was totally awesome, dude.”
“Mort—”
“How about I go in and order up ten thousand fliers? See if good ol’ Bob is in there.”
“How about you go in and ask what ten thousand fliers would cost, maybe save us a couple thousand dollars?”
“That’d work, too.”
“Got your wig and moustache?”
“Yup.”
“Then go get ’em, hotshot. We’ll wait.”
Man, that was a lot of irony. I put on my disguise, such as it was, and went into the shop. Two guys were there, both in their fifties, so I had a fifty-fifty shot of picking out our suspect—if you get both ways that worked out. If I wanted to really screw this up, I could ask which one of them was Bob.
Or not.
“Hey,” I said. “Which one of you’s Bob?” I had to half-shout over a printer that was chucking out paper by the ream.
A mostly bald guy in overalls looked up. “That’s me. Who wants to know?”
“I do. Name’s Steve. Earl said you do good work here.”
“Earl who?”
“Earl Johnson.”
“Don’t know an Earl Johnson, but we do good work here so it don’t matter. What can I do you for?”
“I need ten thousand fliers. I’m looking for a cost estimate.”
He stared at me. “Ten thousand?”
Well, shit. That would weigh about a hundred pounds. I caught the disbelief, read his body language, and did a gumshoe shuffle that would’ve made Jeri proud. I would describe it to her later, see if it got me more chicken soup, or maybe something better. “Christ, did I say ten? I meant a thousand. Ten thousand and I could stuff nine thousand of ’em in my walls for insulation.”
He snorted a laugh. “Okay, a thou. CMYK? Black and white? Can’t give an estimate if I don’t know what you’re after.”
“CMYK?”
“Four-color printing.”
Well, shit. I didn’t know crap about printing. But I am a trained professional, so I
